THE PLANET INSIDE

Scientists are probing the secrets of the inner core—and learning how it might have
saved life on Earth

31 MAR 2022 • BY PAUL VOOSEN

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C. BICKEL/SCIENCE

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A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 376, Issue 6588.

Earth’s magnetic field, nearly as old as the planet itself, protects life from damaging space radiation. But
565 million years ago, the field was sputtering, dropping to 10% of today’s strength, according to a recent
discovery. Then, almost miraculously, over the course of just a few tens of millions of years, it regained
its strength—just in time for the sudden profusion of complex multicellular life known as the Cambrian
explosion.

What could have caused the rapid revival? Increasingly, scientists believe it was the birth of Earth’s inner
core, a sphere of solid iron that sits within the molten outer core, where churning metal generates the
planet’s magnetic field. Once the inner core was born, possibly 4 billion years after the planet itself, its
treelike growth—accreting a few millimeters per year at its surface—would have turbocharged motions in
the outer core, reviving the faltering magnetic field and renewing the protective shield for life. “The
inner core regenerated Earth’s magnetic field at a really interesting time in evolution,” says John
Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester. “What would have happened if it didn’t form?”

Just why and how the inner core was born at that moment is one of many lingering puzzles about the
Pluto-size orb 5000 kilo meters underfoot. “The inner core is a planet within a planet,” says Hrvoje
Tkalčić, a seismologist at Australian National University (ANU)—with its own topography, its own spin
rate, its own structure. “It’s beneath our feet and yet we still don’t understand some big questions,”
Tkalčić says. 
But researchers are beginning to chip away at those questions. Using the rare seismic waves from
earthquakes or nuclear tests that penetrate or reflect off the inner core, seismologists have discovered it
spins independently from the rest of the planet. Armed with complex computer models, theorists have
predicted the structure and weird behavior of iron alloys crushed by the weight of the world. And
experimentalists are close to confirming some of those predictions in the lab by re-creating the extreme
temperatures and pressures of the inner core.

Arwen Deuss, a geophysicist at Utrecht University, feels a sense of anticipation that may resemble the
mood in the 1960s, when researchers were observing seafloor spreading and on the cusp of discovering
plate tectonics, the theory that makes sense of Earth’s surface. “We have all these observations now,” she
says. It’s simply a matter of putting them all together.

THE ANCIENTS THOUGHT Earth’s center was hollow: the home of Hades or hellfire, or a realm of
tunnels that heated ocean waters. Later, following erroneous density estimates of the Moon and Earth by
Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley suggested in 1686 that Earth was a series of nested shells surrounding a
spinning sphere that drove the magnetism witnessed at the surface.

Basic tenets of planet formation provided a more realistic picture. Some 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was
likely born from the collisions of many asteroidlike “planetesimals.” The dense iron in the planetesimals
would have sunk to the core of the molten proto-Earth, while lighter silicate rocks rose like oil on water
to form the mantle. At temperatures of thousands of degrees and millions of atmospheres of pressure,
the core would have remained molten, even as Earth’s mantle and crust cooled and hardened.

Early 20th century seismologists confirmed that view with a key bit of evidence: an earthquake shadow.
When an earthquake strikes, the rupture emits primary, or pressure, waves (P waves) that ripple out in all
directions. Secondary, or shear, waves (S waves) follow. For large earthquakes, seismologists were able to
detect P waves on the other side of the planet, after they were bent and refracted by Earth’s interior
layers. But strangely, S waves were missing. That only made sense if the iron core was liquid, because
liquids lack the rigidity that allows S waves to sashay through.

It wasn’t until the early 1930s that Inge Lehmann, a pioneering Danish seismologist, noticed another
breed of P waves that showed the core was not entirely liquid. These waves arrived at angles that were
only possible if they had bounced off something dense. By 1936 she had deduced the existence of a solid
inner core, ultimately measured to be about 2440 kilometers in diameter: the planet inside.

Iron heart
Earth’s solid inner core, buried 5000 kilometers below our feet, has remained enigmatic since its
discovery nearly 100 years ago. About the size of Pluto and growing several millimeters every
year, it helps power Earth’s magnetic field. It also possesses a strange interior structure that is
only now coming into view with advances in seismology.

Inner core
At 6000°C and 3 million
atmospheres of pressure,
the inner core is solid iron
but soft.

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Crust Mantle Outer core Innermost inner core
Life sits on a layer of Earth’s thickest The molten iron At the core’s center is
rock that is vanishingly layer is made of outer core was born an off-center globe
thin compared with the 3000 kilometers of along with Earth with odd seismic
rest of the planet. sticky silicate rock. 4.5 billion years ago. characteristics.

A mysterious reflection S wave Earthquake P wave

Earthquake pressure (P)
and shear (S) waves refract
as they pass through Earth,
but the liquid outer core
stymies S waves. In 1936, Mantle
Inge Lehmann discovered Outer
P waves in a shadow zone core Lehmann
associated with an entirely P wave
Inner
molten core—only possible Core
if the waves were reflections
off a solid sphere rather
than refractions.

S wave P wave
shadow shadow
zone zone

Magnetic driver Magnetic flux Rotation

Earth’s magnetic field, which
protects life from radiation, Convection
is driven by convective
motions in the molten outer Mantle
core. Growth of the inner
core turbocharges those
motions. As iron crystallizes,
Inner Outer core
it spits out light elements core
like oxygen or silicon, which
rise toward the mantle,
dragging iron with them.
Helical flow

Erratic spinner Repeater Nuclear

Waves from repeating earthquake test
earthquakes and nuclear Mantle
tests have shown that the
inner core does not rotate in Detector
sync with the rest of the Outer 
planet. Some researchers core
 believe gravitational tugs
from dense blobs at the
bottom of the mantle could Dense
be responsible for the blob
Inner core
erratic spinning. spin
Mantle
spin

Detector

C. BICKEL/SCIENCE

THE SOUTH SANDWICH ISLANDS are inhospitable volcanic crags in the far southern Atlantic Ocean.
They are also earthquake factories, thanks to the nearby subduction of the South American tectonic
plate. Seismologists like them for another, geometric reason: Earthquake waves that rocket from the
islands to a lonely seismic station in Alaska shoot straight through the inner core.

Nearly 30 years ago, Xiaodong Song and Paul Richards—both seismologists then at Columbia University
—thought they could use those waves to get a handle on the spin of the inner core, which, suspended in
liquid, is under no obligation to rotate in sync with the rest of the planet. Combing through archival
seismic records, they looked for subtle variations in the travel times of P waves for several dozen South
Sandwich earthquakes over the course of decades. Their travel times through the outer core and mantle
stayed constant, as expected. But with each passing year, P waves going through the inner core sped up a
bit. “It was delicate, but you could see the changes,” Song says.

There was only one way he and Richards could account for this puzzling trend: The inner core was
rotating faster than the rest of the planet, by about 1° per year. This superrotation was gradually
realigning the seismic wave paths with a north-south axis in the inner core known to boost P wave
speeds. Every 400 years, they suggested in a 1996 Nature paper, the inner core made an extra revolution
inside Earth.

A few years later, John Vidale, a seismologist now at the University of Southern California, validated the
result using a slightly different method. Vidale specializes in using records from the Large Aperture
Seismic Array (LASA), a U.S. Air Force facility in Montana, closed in 1978, that operated more than 500
sensors in deep boreholes to detect atomic bomb tests. “It’s still the best data, better than the best arrays
today,” he says. Seismic waves from nuclear tests were ideal because, unlike earthquakes, the source can
be precisely located.

Vidale used the waves from two Soviet underground bomb tests detonated in 1971 and 1974 beneath
Novaya Zemlya, a remote Arctic archipelago. Instead of looking for waves that passed through the inner
core, as Song and Richards did, Vidale chose ones that ricocheted off it, registering its spin like the beam
of a radar gun. “We could see one side of the inner core getting closer, and one side getting further
away,” he says.

He found that over the 3 years between the tests, the inner core rotated 0.15° per year faster than the
rest of the planet—much less than Song’s first estimate. But subsequent work by Song in 2005, using 18
pairs of South Sandwich earthquakes that repeated in the same spot over the span of decades, lined up
with Vidale’s reduced estimate.

The discovery of the inner core’s superrotation shocked many geophysicists, who had assumed it spun at
the same rate as the mantle. It also tantalized them. The rotation could offer clues to how the inner core
couples to the outer core and influences the magnetic dynamo. Some thought it could even help explain
why Earth’s magnetic poles wander and flip from time to time.

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But almost as rapidly as this picture of the inner core’s spin emerged, it grew more complicated and more
mysterious. “What we thought 10 years ago isn’t holding together,” Vidale says.

RECENTLY, SONG, now at Peking University, decided to revisit his rotation work. His postdoc, Yi Yang,
compiled the world’s most extensive database of repeating earthquakes, with sources not just in the
South Sandwich Islands, but also in places like Chile and Kazakhstan. Analyzing more than 500 source-
detector pairs with a range of paths through the core, Song and Yi found that the superrotation stopped
all at once a decade ago, and since then the inner core has rotated at the same speed as the mantle. The
changes “all disappear at the same time,” says Song, who presented the work at a meeting of the
American Geophysical Union (AGU) late last year.

Meanwhile, Vidale was trying to push his trend

further back in time using LASA data. He focused
on two bomb-induced earthquakes, both set off by
the U.S. government underneath the far end of
Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, in 1969 and 1971. The
tests were controversial; the second, Cannikin, at
5 megatons, was the largest ever U.S.
underground test, and it faced opposition from
environmental activists who chartered a fishing
ship, christened it Greenpeace, and sailed it to the
island in protest. Despite appeals to the Supreme
Court, the test went as planned, creating a crater
lake at the island’s surface even though the
detonation was 1800 meters down.

The two tests created another, much delayed

splash last year at the AGU meeting. Vidale
reported that waves from the detonations revealed
not superrotation, but subrotation: During the
time between the two U.S. tests, the inner core
rotated more slowly than the rest of the planet, by
some 0.05° per year. Yet by the time of the Soviet In 1971, a 5-megaton nuclear bomb was lowered into a borehole
tests, the inner core had somehow reversed course in Alaska. Seismic waves from the blast bounced off the inner
core, helping gauge its spin. UNITED STATES ATOMIC ENERGY
and sped up. The “observations are really
COMMISSION
amazing,” says Barbara Romanowicz, a
seismologist at the University of California (UC),
Berkeley.

For Vidale, the pattern from 1969 to 1974, from slow to fast, may indicate a fundamental rhythm of the
inner core. For decades, radio astronomers have tracked minute changes in Earth’s surface rotation—the
length of a day—against a cosmic reference frame: the fixed position of distant cosmic beacons called
quasars. Although most of the yearly jitter is due to events like hurricanes and earthquakes, a tiny-but-
regular 6-year wobble in day length has emerged. “Nobody has been able to say what causes it,” says
Benjamin Chao, a geodesist at Academia Sinica. “But everybody bets on the core.”

Chao says one possible explanation for the 6-year cycle is gravitational interactions between the mantle
and inner core. The inner core is likely to be lumpy, with hills hundreds of meters high, and at the
bottom of the mantle, seismologists have discovered two ultradense, continent-size blobs. The tugs of
the blobs on the hills could create a loose coupling between the mantle and the inner core—enough to
“pull the inner core back and forth” in cycles of superrotation and subrotation, Chao says.

Song, however, only sees a slowdown, with no sign of an oscillation. He ties his record to a longer term
trend in the length of a day, which saw the planet spin progressively faster from the 1970s before settling
down in the early 2000s. Song thinks gravitational tugs from the mantle might have pulled the inner core 
along, but with a lag.

Given that neither finding has yet been published, it’s hard to say how they fit together. “Is everybody
right? Is everybody wrong?” Romanowicz asks. Either way, varying rotation seems more plausible than
constant superrotation, says Miaki Ishii, a seismologist at Harvard University. “It makes more sense than
what we have right now.”

THE INNER CORE is the most metal place on Earth—even more so than the outer core. Both are made
mostly of iron, along with a smattering of nickel. But the iron is thought to also contain traces of lighter
elements like oxygen, carbon, and silicon. As the iron crystallizes on the growing surface of the inner
core, it spits out some of those elements, leaving behind almost pure iron, much as ice freezing from a
bucket of saltwater expels the salt and becomes largely fresh. The expelled elements, lighter than iron,
rise and sweep along the surrounding liquid, driving up to 80% of the convection that generates Earth’s
magnetic field.

The nature of the iron left behind is the subject of ongoing debate. Iron atoms at Earth’s surface—in your
cast iron skillet, for example—pack themselves in cubic arrangements. But when tiny samples of iron are
compressed between two diamonds to inner core–like pressures, the atoms rearrange into hexagons. The
hard question is what happens when iron is simultaneously squashed and heated to thousands of
degrees, says Lidunka Vočadlo, a computational mineral physicist at University College London. These
conditions are difficult to re-create in the lab, because carbon in the diamonds often contaminates the
iron when the apparatus is heated. But in computer models, Vočadlo says, “There’s no limit to the
pressure and temperature you can get.”

Modeling by Vočadlo and her collaborators suggests hexagonal packing is the most stable arrangement
under inner core conditions. The models also find that pure iron grows soft when it sits at 98% of its
melting point, as it may throughout much of the inner core. This “premelting effect,” as it is called, could
explain why S waves travel much slower than expected in the supposedly solid inner core.

The story isn’t closed for cubic iron, however. Just as water must cool below freezing before ice can
nucleate, researchers have suggested iron can’t solidify directly into its hexagonal form unless it is
nearly 1000 K cooler than the inner core. Atom-scale modeling published early this year by a team led by
Yang Sun, a mineral physicist at Columbia, suggests a solution: Iron accreting onto the inner core could
first crystallize into its cubic form before transitioning into a hexagonal end state.

Although the cubic versus hexagonal debate may seem academic, the structure may determine how the
iron crystals align, how much nickel and other light elements can mix with the iron, how much heat it
releases on crystallization, and even its melting point. “The fundamental properties of iron change
depending on what phase you’re in,” Vočadlo says.


Experiments at the National Ignition Facility have focused high-power lasers on small samples of iron to re-create inner core conditions.
NATIONAL IGNITION FACILITY

A new wave of lab studies may help settle the question. After years of halting progress, researchers are
on the verge of regularly re-creating and observing inner core conditions. One strategy is to press and
heat iron in diamond anvil cells, as before—but to glimpse its structure, quickly, before it is
contaminated with carbon. New, powerful x-ray light sources such as the Extremely Brilliant Source at
the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, which turned on in 2020, can take that kind of flash photo.

Another is to harness the massive lasers of the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory (LLNL), which are typically aimed at pellets of hydrogen isotopes to spark tiny
nuclear fusion reactions. In a study published earlier this year, NIF researchers instead turned some of
those beams on iron, heating and pressurizing it to levels far beyond those seen in Earth’s core. Each
time they examined the iron’s structure with an x-ray, it came out the same—as hexagonal iron, says
Richard Kraus, an LLNL research scientist who led the study.

A third tack to re-create the inner core is through shock wave experiments. Jung-Fu Lin, an experimental
mineral physicist at the University of Texas, Austin, has partnered with researchers in China who use
bursts of gas to fire projectiles into iron at speeds 10 times faster than a rifle bullet, generating corelike
temperatures and pressures. They are already seeing hints of the premelting effect identified by Vočadlo
and predicted by others. If the results hold up, they may suggest the “solid” inner core isn’t so solid after
all. “It’s like a smoothie,” Lin says. “Very soft.”

If the inner core is a mystery, then the “innermost” inner core is a riddle wrapped in a mystery. Since the
1980s, seismologists have known that seismic waves run faster through the inner core along a north-
south axis, perhaps because the iron crystals have a common alignment, presumably along the prevailing
direction of Earth’s magnetic field. But in 2002, Ishii and Adam Dziewoński, also at Harvard, discovered
that within a sphere roughly 600 kilometers across, that fast lane is tilted by 45°. Ishii says that anomaly
could be a relic of an ancient, tilted magnetic field or a kernel of cubic rather than hexagonal iron. No
matter what, she says, “There’s something different going on at the center of the Earth.”

Researchers are poised to turn these hints into something more rigorous. Over the past decade, a clutch
of high-quality seismometers has been erected in Antarctica, allowing researchers to catch far more
earthquake waves that pass through the inner core’s north-south fast lanes. Armed with the improved

resolutions provided by these waves and many others globally, Utrecht’s Deuss and her graduate student
Henry Brett used a supercomputing-based technique to create the first 3D view of the inner core—a bit
like a CT scan in the hospital.

This work, set for publication soon, confirms the existence of the innermost core, but finds it is slightly
offset from the planet’s center. It also reveals speed differences between the fast lanes seen in the inner
core’s western and eastern hemispheres. That suggests the story of the fast lanes is more complicated
than iron crystals aligning with the dominant magnetic field, which would have a more uniform signal.
It’s still early days, similar to where imaging of the mantle was in the 1980s, but Brett says more detailed
models are coming soon. “We’re going to be able to ask more interesting questions.”

ALL THIS COMPLEXITY appears to be geologically recent. Scientists once placed the inner core’s birth
back near the planet’s formation. But a decade ago, researchers found, using diamond anvils at outer
core conditions, that iron conducts heat at least twice as fast as previously thought. Cooling drives the
growth of the inner core, so the rapid heat loss combined with the inner core’s current size meant it was
unlikely to have formed more than 1 billion years ago, and more than likely came even later. “There’s no
way around a relatively recent appearance of the inner core,” says Bruce Buffett, a geodynamicist at UC
Berkeley.

The dynamo could have been close to dying.

PETER DRISCOLL
CARNEGIE INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE

Tarduno realized rocks from the time might record the dramatic magnetic field changes expected at the
inner core’s birth. Until recently, the paleomagnetic data from 600 million to 1 billion years ago were
sparse. So Tarduno went searching for rocks of the right age containing tiny, needle-shaped crystals of
the mineral titanomagnetite, which record the magnetic field’s strength at the time of their
crystallization. In a 565-million-year-old volcanic formation on the north bank of the St. Lawrence River
in Quebec, his team found the crystals—and convincing evidence that the magnetic field of the time was
one-tenth the present day strength, they reported in 2019. The fragility of the field at the time has since
been confirmed by multiple studies.

It was probably a sign that rapid heat loss from the outer core was weakening the convective motions
that generate the magnetic field, says Peter Driscoll, a geodynamicist at the Carnegie Institution for
Science. “The dynamo could have been close to dying,” he says. Its death could have left Earth’s
developing life—which mostly lived in the ocean as microbes and protojellyfish—exposed to far more
radiation from solar flares. In Earth’s atmosphere, where oxygen levels were rising, the increased
radiation could have ionized some of this oxygen, allowing it to escape to space and depleting a valuable
resource for life, Tarduno says. “The potential for loss was gaining.”

Just 30 million years later, the tide had turned in favor of life. Tarduno’s team went to quarries and
roadcuts in the Wichita Mountains of Oklahoma and harvested 532-million-year-old volcanic rocks.
After analyzing the field strength frozen in the tiny magnetic needles, they found that its intensity had
already jumped to 70% of present values, they reported at the AGU meeting. “That kind of nails it now,”
Tarduno says. He credits the growth of the inner core for the field jump, which he says is “the true
signature of inner core nucleation.”

Around the same time, life experienced its own revolution: the Cambrian explosion, the rapid
diversification of life that gave rise to most animal groups and eventually led to the first land animals,
protomillipedes that ventured onto land some 425 million years ago.

 It just may be that the clement world they found owes much to the inner iron planet we’ll never see, 5000
kilometers below.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Voosen  
Paul Voosen is a staff writer who covers Earth and planetary science.

doi: 10.1126/science.abq2618

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